Part 14 (1/2)

I do not feel any antipathy toward the South, for I did not take any part in the war, remaining in Canada during the whole time, and so I can not now be accused of offensive partisans.h.i.+p. I have always avoided anything that would look like a settled conviction in any of these matters, retaining always a fair, unpartisan and neutral idiocy in relation to all national affairs, so that I might be regarded as a good civil service reformer, and perhaps at some time hold an office.

To further ill.u.s.trate how fair-minded I am in these matters, I may say I have patiently read all the war articles written by both sides, and I have not tried to dodge the foot-notes or the marginal references, or the war maps or the memoranda. I have read all these things until I can't tell who was victorious, and if that is not a fair and impartial way to look at the war, I don't know how to proceed in order to eradicate my prejudices.

But a railroad is not a political or sectional matter, and it ought not to be a local matter unless the train stays at one end of the line all the time. This road, however, is the one that discharged its engineer some years ago, and when he took his time-check he said he would now go to work for a sure-enough road with real iron rails to it, instead of two streaks of rust on a right of way.

All night long, except when we were changing cars, we rattled along over wobbling trestles and third mortgages. The cars were graded from third-cla.s.s down. The road itself was not graded at all.

They have the same old air in these coaches that they started out with.

Different people, with various styles of breath, have used this air and then returned it. They are using the same air that they did before the war. It is not, strictly speaking, a national air. It is more of a languid air, with dark circles around its eyes.

At one place where I had an engagement to change cars, we had a wait of four hours, and I reclined on a hair-cloth lounge at the hotel, with the intention of sleeping a part of the time.

Dear, patient reader, did you every try to ride a refractory hair-cloth lounge all night, bare back? Did you ever get aboard a short, old-fas.h.i.+oned, black, hair-cloth lounge, with a disposition to buck?

I was told that this was a kind, family lounge that would not shy or make trouble anywhere, but I had only just closed my dark-red and mournful eyes in sleep when this lounge gently humped itself, and shed me as it would its smooth, dark hair in the spring, tra la.

The floor caught me in its great strong arms and I vaulted back upon the polished bosom of the hair-cloth lounge. It was made for a man about fifty-three inches in length, and so I had to sleep with my feet in my pistol pockets and my nose in my bosom up to the second joint.

I got so that I could rise off the floor and climb on the lounge without waking up. It grew to be second nature to me. I did it just as a man who is hungry in his sleep bites off large fragments of the air and eats it involuntarily and smacks his lips and snorts. So I arose and deposited myself again and again on that old swayback but frolicsome wreck without waking. But I couldn't get aboard softly enough to avoid waking the lounge. It would yawn and rumble inside and rise and fall like the deep rolling sea, till at last I gave up trying to sleep on it any more, and curled up on the floor.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _I bought tickets at Cincinnati of a pale, sallow liar, who is just beginning to work his way up to the forty-ninth degree in the Order of Ananias_ (Page 222)]

The hair-cloth lounge, in various conditions of decrepitude, maybe found all through this region. Its true inwardness is composed of spiral springs which have gnawed through the cloth in many instances. These springs have lost none of their old elasticity of spirits, and cordially corkscrew themselves into the affections of the man who sits down on them. If anything could make me thoroughly attached to the South it would be one of these spiral springs bored into my person about a foot.

But that is the only way to remain on a hair-cloth chair or sofa. No man ever successfully sat on one of them for any length of time unless he had a strong pair of pantaloons and a spiral spring twisted into him for some distance.

In private houses hair-cloth sofas may be found in a domesticated state, with a pair of dark, reserved chairs, waiting for some one to come and fall off them. In hotels they go in larger flocks, and graze together in the parlor.

THE THOUGHT CLOTHIER

XXV

General Dado has been sharply criticised--roundly abused, even--for making a claim against the Grant estate for alleged a.s.sistance in preparing the ”Memoirs” that have added to that estate some half-million of dollars. The Philadelphia _Bulletin_ says:--”There is no mark of contempt so strong that it ought not to be fixed on so shameless and unblus.h.i.+ng an ingrate.” And it is this--the man's ingrat.i.tude--that most offends. General Grant's unswerving loyalty to Dado, his zeal in giving places to him so long as he had them to give, and in soliciting others to give them when it was no longer in his own power to do so, was an offense in the nostrils of most Americans. His intimacy with Dado was one of the causes of Grant's being in bad odor, as it were, at a certain period of his career; and the present unpleasantness is a part of the penalty for taking such a man into his bosom. The claimant is getting the worst of it, however, and we are tempted to overlook his ingrat.i.tude for the sake of the following skit called forth by his appearance as a thinker and clothier of thoughts.--_The Critic_.

There is something slightly pathetic in the delayed statement that some of General Grant's best thoughts were supplied by General Adam Dado.

While it is a great credit to any man to do the meditating, pondering, and word-painting necessary for a book which can attain such a sale as Grant's ”Memoirs,” it shows a condition of affairs which every literary man or woman must sadly deplore. Who of us is now safe?

While the warrior, as a warrior, has nothing to do but continue victorious through life, he can not safely write a book for posterity.

Literature is at all times more or less hazardous under present copyright regulations, but it becomes doubly so when our estates have to reimburse some silent thinker who thought things for us while amanuensing in our employ. Even though we may have told him not to think thoughts for us, even though we asked him as a special favor to avoid putting his own clothing on our poor, little, s.h.i.+vering, naked facts, there is no law which can prevent his making that claim after we are dead.

And how can a court of law or an intelligent jury judge such a matter? A great man thinks a thought in the presence of two amanuenses, provided I am right in spelling the plural in that way. He thinks a thought, I say, surrounded by those two gentlemen and an improved typewriter. He gives utterance to the thought and dies. One of the amanuensisters then states to the jury that he thought it himself, and that his comrade clothed it.

The estate is then asked to pay so much per think for the thoughts and so much at war prices for clothing the ideas. Who is able, unless it be an intelligent jury, to arrive at the truth?

The first question to ask ourselves is this: Was General Grant in the habit of calling in a thinker whenever he wanted anything done in that line? He says distinctly in his letter that he was not. He could not do it. It was impracticable. Supposing in the crash of battle and in the moment of victory your short, hard thinker has his head shot off and it falls in a pumpkin orchard, where there is naturally more or less delay in identifying it, what can you do? Suppose that you were the president of the United States, and your think-supply got snow-bound at Newark in a vestibule train, and congress were waiting for you to veto a bill. You could not think the thought in the first place, and even if you could you would hate to send it to congress until it was properly clothed. I am told that nothing shocks congress so much as the sudden appearance ”in its midst” of a naked and new-born thought.

But General Dado has the advantage over General Grant in one respect. He can not be injured much. Otherwise the case is against him. But the matter will be watched with careful interest by literary people generally, and especially by soldiers and magazines with a war history.